Weekly Review 17 July 2026

Some interesting links that I Tweeted about in the last week (I also post these on Mastodon, Threads, Newsmast, and Bluesky):

1. AI data centres are producing an enormous amount of pollution: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/pollution-ai-data-centers-severe
2. Students using AI do not get smarter: https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/09/brown-says-ai-make-class-dumb-teacher-must-help-use-better/5269291
3. In Singapore at least, only a tiny minority of workers use AI regularly: https://dataconomy.com/2026/07/08/singapore-workers-ai-daily-usage-6-percent-salesforce/
4. OpenAI won't be the only AI company hit with legal sanctions, they all scraped huge amounts of text for their training data: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/07/openai-faked-inability-to-search-training-data-hid-billions-of-logs-nyt-says/
5. An AI that will find an apply for jobs for you. Of course, AI will be screening the applications: https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/09/ai-tool-scours-the-web-for-job-openings-preps-your-resume-and-cover-letter/5269410
6. Bad actors continue to use AI to try to extort money from vulnerable people: https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/world/691548/scammers-use-ai-image-to-target-parents-of-wa-missing-man
7. While many people consider AI generated art to be a poor substitute for human-created works, there is a market for it: https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-art-market
8. A tool to help developers avoid the skills atrophy causes by using AI code generators: https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/07/avoid-ai-atrophy-new-tool-promises-to-reverse-vibe-coding-skills-decay/5267913
9. The hardware demands of AI continue to impact memory supplies: https://www.theregister.com/personal-tech/2026/07/08/ai-memory-crunch-takes-a-bite-out-of-pc-shipments/5268593
10. The price of accessing AI continues to drop: https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/08/ai-is-becoming-a-bargain-hunters-market-with-a-few-luxury-models-on-top/5268050
11. Experiences with rolling-out AI in the classroom, from the point of view of a CIO: https://www.informationweek.com/digital-transformation/teacher-turned-cto-on-securing-ai-in-the-classroom
12. Stacking die sideways can help increase memory density to better meet the demands of AI: https://spectrum.ieee.org/stacking-chips-sideways
13. Other factors beyond GPU determine AI performance: https://dataconomy.com/2026/07/09/why-ai-performance-depends-on-more-than-gpus/
14. Workers who use AI the most are the most concerned about being replaced by AI: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/ai-paradox-new-research-gives-insights-into-ai-behaviour-in-kiwi-workplaces/PRH6CUGAXBDFFB7PKLXNYMINEM/
15. Smaller AI models allow for the use of AI in situations where network connectivity is reduced or absent: https://spectrum.ieee.org/small-language-models-ai-pharmaceuticals
16. AI is pushing language towards a sort of beige averageness: https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/jul/04/future-of-fiction-next-great-novel-ai-language-chat-gpt
17. Another AI project misses its carbon emissions reduction goal: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/06/lanarkshire-scotland-ai-datacentre-project-renewable-energy
18. More warning around investing in AI: https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/bank-of-america-ai-investors-reality-check
19. Building organisational accountability around AI: https://www.computerworld.com/article/4184169/how-to-make-ai-accountability-stick.html
20. An AI tool for making AI-written academic papers sound less like they were written by AI: https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/08/tool-promises-to-make-lazy-academics-ai-written-papers-sound-more-human/5268460
21. Biases in AI are getting bad enough that they're changing the meanings of posts: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/06/ai-altering-meaning-of-users-drafts-on-issues-from-abortion-to-climate-study-finds
22. The majority of longform content on X and Linkedin is AI generated: https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/07/09/ai-slop-writing-has-taken-over-the-internet-particularly-linkedin-and-x/5269525
23. The British NHS is rolling out an AI triage system: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/jul/04/nhs-ai-app-patients-appropriate-services-health
24. AI tools now make building botnets trivial: https://arstechnica.com/security/2026/07/hackers-can-use-9-of-the-most-popular-ai-tools-to-assemble-massive-botnets/
25. If reviewers are going to use AI to review papers, then I'm all in favour of the use of tripwires to catch them out: https://www.the-scientist.com/a-trap-for-ai-use-in-peer-reviews-sparks-controversy-74702
26. It turns out that previous AI struggle to use spreadsheets: https://spectrum.ieee.org/large-tabular-models-nexus
27. General AI for robotics continues to advance: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/07/robot-workers-rising-how-ai-may-drive-general-purpose-autonomy-in-robotics/